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Law360 Canada (October 11, 2024, 2:14 PM EDT) — Day one of a family law conference in Winnipeg featured a lesson on brain science and how childhood experiences shape lives — for better or for worse.
Oct. 9 marked the first day of the Canadian Institute for Administration of Justice’s (CIAJ) Families and the Law, a three-day examination of the nation’s justice system and its impacts on families.
It is the CIAJ’s 48th annual conference, held from Oct. 9 through 11.
As part of the opening remarks, Manitoba Court of Appeal Chief Justice Marianne Rivoalen, the event’s chair, spoke of the pervasiveness of separation, divorce or other familial issues.
“I think it’s safe to say that many Canadians will experience some family law issue in their lifetime,” said Rivoalen. “If it’s not you, it’s your child or it’s your neighbour or it’s your sister. Everybody knows somebody who has had some experience with family law issues.”
The second talk of the day was Harnessing Brain Science to Re-Imagine the Family Justice System, a lecture on the science behind how familial experiences in childhood can impact one’s future.
The lecture was given by Nicole Sherren, an expert in early brain development.
Sherren, a self-described “brain chauvinist,” says the complications and tensions of a high-conflict family court situation can negatively impact children.
“I do believe that you are your brain,” Sherren told participants. “So, every thought you have, every emotion you experience, every behaviour you exhibit comes from this particular organ. … And it turns out that we 1728674828 have decades and decades worth of information about how the experiences that we have — particularly in childhood, but over the course of a lifespan — how they change [your brain] in ways that make it more challenging for us to succeed — in school, at work, with our families and, overall, in life. And that is really what [we] are seeing in the court system today.”
Sherren said the thinking around brain science has shifted over time. One way is in how experts view the notion of resilience — the ability to handle adverse situations and react to them. It was once thought, she said, that resilience was inborn. It was in the genes. Biologically given.
But this has turned out not to be the case.
Resilience is a skill that can be built up over time, she said.
“Based on several new decades of science, we now think of resilience in a very different way. We think about it not just [as] a positive outcome in the face of negative experiences but also [having] dynamic capacity. So, it’s a skill we can build over time.”
To build resilience, she said, is the ability to accumulate positive experiences with others — particularly in parent-child relationships — and to counter the “piling up” of negative experiences.
One’s experiences influence brain structure over time.
“High-quality experiences equal a high-quality structure, and low-quality experiences equal lower quality structure. And this particular development process is going on over a very long period of time.”
Sherren went on to paint two different scenarios:
One is where a child grows up with two parents, has access to quality childcare, has relationships with their peers, has adult supports around them and is being encouraged to develop cognitively.
The second is where a child’s parents are entrenched in a high-conflict divorce, where the parents are constantly fighting and, as a result, their focus has been taken away from their child.
That latter child, Sherren said, will pick up on their parents’ hostility.
“This child is getting lots of opportunity to practice certain skills that we don’t really want to have strengthened in their brain. They are seeing anger and aggression in the home, seeing this as an appropriate way to respond to other people. They are doing that over and over again, they are strengthening those anger and aggression circuits.”
(And a situation involving domestic violence would only exacerbate this, she said.)
A way of combating this is for a child to have a positive “social experience” with a “responsive adult.” Sherren describes it as a “serve and return” situation: A child serves up a bid for social interaction from an adult, and the adult not only returns that serve appropriately but continues a back-and-forth with the child.
“What that does is it gives the children the opportunity to practice … basic skills and abilities to strengthen neurocircuits in their brain, and it’s going to look different, depending on the age of the child.”
This also helps a child practice “focused attention” — a skill that can strengthen over time.
Sherren also spoke of “executive function” — the brain’s ability to accumulate a set of skills that allow one to navigate complex physical, emotional and social environments. Executive function — good or bad — can impact academic performance, the ability to maintain employment and the capacity to successfully raise a family.
If you have any information, story ideas or news tips for Law360 Canada, please contact Terry Davidson at t.davidson@lexisnexis.ca or 905-415-5899.
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